So yesterday I was doing some disk cleanup, dumping browser cache files, etc. I decided for the first time ever to use the Windows Disk Cleanup Tool. I went after items marked "dump files": Debug dump files, system error dump files. I even typed what I was about to do into the googles to check if there would be any issues. "Hey, as long as you aren't currently troubleshooting, they're just log files, so clean away!" Okay, sounds good - run!
All looked to go well yesterday, then I turned my computer on this morning. "Updating Windows - 100% - do not turn off your computer" (there were no updates pending when I turned it off yesterday). %&^*$&^! I let it sit there for 30 minutes. There was no disk activity. Okay, this happened to me once before and I went ahead and did a hard reboot that time and everything started right up. Did the same this time and got: "Updating Windows - 35% - do not turn off your computer" &%&^*($&! %^^&*$! $%^*!
This time there was disk activity, so I let it sit for nearly two hours and finally got it to the login screen. Turned it off and on again a couple of times to make sure all was okay, and I'm finally back up.
While I was waiting, I broke out the spare laptop and did some searching. While I saw no "Hey, watch out!" warnings regarding disk cleanup when I checked before I started, after searching for "update hangs after disk cleanup" there were pages of this happening. So this post is just an FYI for anyone thinking of running the resident disk cleanup tool. It is not worth it. If I want to cleanup temp files I'll stick with Spybot, which never gives me any issues, and cache cleanup within individual browsers. Stupid Ben. Stupid Microsoft.